Quantum Forest

Scamander, Tasmania

I spent a few days based in Scamander, North Eastern Tasmania. The drive up North with Rebecca and Andrew was quite pleasant; only three hours and we reached the first stopover. Note: this was written last Tuesday, but there was no way to connect to internet from the hotel.

In the last couple of months I came across two papers about the analysis of progeny trials that require some comment: one on diallels and one on clonal data. Both of them expand on the tricks and contortions required to run those analysis using SAS, specifically using proc mixed and proc iml.

I was quite surprised about the transformation of computational limitations of a specific piece of software (namely SAS) into research papers. Both problems can be tackled in one line of model specification in ASReml. Potentially, one could write a macro in MSWord for BLUP analyses, but is it worth doing it? So what is going on? It seems that being provincial and sticking to old school models pays on terms of boosting publication records. Please guys, just visit the ASReml cookbook and get a life!